YUCAIPA: Artist’s ‘Nature of Things’ at Crafton Hills College

From the moment Raul Acero opened a barrel of ceramic clay and sniffed its aroma, he was hooked. “I loved the smell and feel of the clay,” said Acero, an art professor at the University of Redlands. “Something about it just felt right.”

At the time, Acero was a college student studying anthropology in upstate New York. “But what I liked most about anthropology was when the people I studied made art,” he said. Although he had no previous exposure to art through his high school years, he knew then what he wanted to do with his life.

Studying on scholarship at Ohio University, Acero earned a master’s in fine arts in ceramics and sculpture, learning skills that he has transferred to such media as stone, wood, metal and clay.

A distillation of Acero’s years as an artist will go on display April 5 at the Crafton Hills College Gallery in a show titled “The Nature of Things.”

The idea for the show began with a vision, he said. Starting with the image of a valley, he pictured a tree where people could bring both sadness and hope.

“I imagined a place where a type of pilgrimage could be made, each (person) bringing their sorrows and their dreams and spending time under the limbs of this beautiful, grand and forgiving, accepting, tree,” he wrote in his artist’s statement for the show.

Many years earlier, Acero had made sculptures from the limbs of trees in Brooklyn, where the native of Colombia was living as a young man.

“I decided to make one or two again and collected limbs from the tree trimmers on campus at the university in Redlands,” he wrote.

Soon he found himself adding clay heads and plaster parts, then drawing them on paper as he moved back and forth between sculpture and drawing. His valley eventually became orchestrated by original music that he composed on keyboards, bringing his imaginary world to life in every dimension.

“Such is the realm, and the power of art, and the nature of things,” he wrote.

After earning his degrees, Acero began his art teaching career in Puerto Rico, making use of his bilingual skills in Spanish and English. Back in New York, he spent a dozen or so years as a working artist with his own business, fashioning ceramic tiles and making molds. He also taught at the Parsons School of Design.

“It’s important as a teacher to also be an active artist so that what you’re teaching, you’re also doing,” he said.

During the 1990s, he came west to join the art faculty at the University of Redlands. After a teaching stint back in New York, he returned to Redlands five years ago to re-join the university art community.

Acero’s show at Crafton Hills College is part of a collaboration between the art faculties of the Yucaipa junior college and the University of Redlands. Professors from each school have mounted shows at the other school’s gallery in the past. Crafton is now utilizing a new small space for art that suits Acero’s show well, he said.

“The Nature of Things” is comprised of two free-standing tree sculptures fashioned of wood and clay, 17 pen and ink drawings on rice paper and a series of small ceramic heads that have become Acero’s most recent artistic passion.

“I love to pull these heads up out of the clay and watch them come to life under my hands,” he said.

He feels that he understands the medium and material well after working in ceramics for so many years.

“One of the things that comes with age is that I can be spontaneous and go with the raw clay until, if I am lucky, a head and face emerge,” he said. “My job is not to mess it up.”

To Acero, the heads represent the essence of human beings, their souls, or what he calls alma, the Spanish word for soul. “They are a repository for the spirit and I often leave them open at the top so the spirit can come and go.”

“The Nature of Things” will show from April 5 to 26 at the Crafton Hills College Art Gallery at 1171 Sand Canyon Road, Yucaipa. A public reception will be held April 5 from 4:30 to 7 p.m. For information, call 909-389-3353.

This summer, Acero will be teaching a ceramics workshop for adults at all skill levels from July 23 to 30 at the University of Redlands. For information, visit his website at http://www.raulacero.net.